216330 - Links in mail should give same options as links in Firefox

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Jake Zukowski]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1

Context menus and shortcut keys for links in Thunderbird should be the exact
same as those in Firebird.  I should have the ability to open a new foreground
or background tab, open the link in a new window or open the link in the active
window.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get a piece of mail with links in it
2. Right-click link for options.  Scant.
3. Do any special clicks.  (Ctrl-Shift-Click).

Actual Results:  
No options.  Always performs default action of opening in the default web
browser, over the active page.

Expected Results:  
Any option allowed in Firebird.  I should see the options if I right-click.  If
I Ctrl-Shift-Click a link, that link should open in a new tab in Firebird, with
that tab being the active tab.

Comment 1

[Scott MacGregor]

we give the urls to the operating system. It determines what browser and the
browser determines how to open those urls. 

Comment 2

[Jake Zukowski]

That's what I thought, you do a simple shell execute on the thing.  But I'm not
convinced this is great behavior.  If you have Firebird as well, why not use the
power of it?

Comment 3

[Dave Sanders]

I concur - It would be nice if the "birds" were aware of their peers and added
some special behavior. I decided to switch to FB, TB last night from the main
Moz, and the "open in new tab" is the one really annoying thing I'm missing,
that might drive me back to the integrated Moz.

Comment 4

[bugzilla.mozilla.org]

Vote

I'm so much used to that behavior from Mozilla Mail that it makes it realy
difficult to use the current thunderbird for mail and news access.

Just to clarify, apart from the right-click menu
I have set up Mozilla (and Firebird) to open links in a new Window when I do a
middle-mouse-click on the link. This also works in mozilla mail: I always get a
new moz browser window. I need this and without this functionality in
Thunderbird I will not switch ;)

isn't it posible to ad a parameter --newwin=true or whatever to the system call?
If the called browser is Moz/FB then it would open a new window, other browsers
would just ignore that?

Comment 5

[Robert Mohr]

I think this is a dupe of bug 214311.

Comment 6

[Jake Zukowski]

I would debate this is not a dupe.

This bug is broader than 214311.  That bug only asked for the functionality in 
Mozilla Mail, which seems to be achieved through configuration.  This bug 
scopes out the feature more broadly.  

This feature enhancement does not deal with default behaviors.  It deals with 
adding functionality to enable a wide array of behaviors beyond the default 
one. 

Comment 7

[Chris Pickett]

middle-clicking on a link in mozilla mail and having it open a tab is one of its
best features.

a context-menu might be trickier, because you wouldn't want a firefox-specific
context menu if firefox wasn't installed.

Comment 8

[C. Fox]

(In reply to comment #7)
> middle-clicking on a link in mozilla mail and having it open a tab is one of its
> best features.
> 
> a context-menu might be trickier, because you wouldn't want a firefox-specific
> context menu if firefox wasn't installed.

I groaned after I saw the "after 1.0" target for fixing this. It seemed like
such a long time to wait to fix what seems to be a fairly simple bug.

But I now debate whether this is really a "bug" to be solved. It could be
handled better with an official Thunderbird extension that Firefox users could
download to add the functionality. There would be no need to develop a way to
get the two programs to recognise that they are both installed. If you didn't
have the extension, Thunderbird would behave as it does now. If it was
installed, Thunderbird would understand Firefox was there and ask the link to
be opened in a new tab rather than making a new window.

On the plus side, TB 0.7 now opens a new window for each link clicked rather
than blindly opening on the topmost tab in Firefox.

I can't vote for this bug, I guess because it's still listed as new, despite the
fact it's almost a year old.

Comment 9

[Alan Batie]

I like the extension solution; I've just switched from mozilla to ff/tb, and run
them on both windoze and freebsd/gnome.  It's frustrating that on freebsd tb,
you can't click on the links at all --- you have to right click/copy link
location and then manually go to the browser and paste the url to open them. 
Never mind I tell all my users to *never* click on a link in mail ;-)  but I
mostly want this for the slashdot rss feed...

Comment 10

[Paul Mason]

I'm using Thunderbird 3.0.4 with IE8 and I think I'm having a same problem ,web-page links in emails not working that is they not sarting IE8 or not opening the web-page when IE8 is running. However the web-page links in emails did work perfectly well untill the latest round of updates and fixes from Microsoft were installed. 

It looks as if it is one of these updetes/fixes that is causing my problem but if it is one of these MS will never admit to that.

Ive also noticed waht some one says about the priorty settings for wewb-links, that is ,changing them has no effect on making the kink active/open the web-page

Comment 11

[Connor Smith]

(In reply to Jake Zukowski from comment #0)
> User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a)
> Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1
> Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5a)
> Gecko/20030728 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1
> 
> Context menus and shortcut keys for links in Thunderbird should be the exact
> same as those in Firebird.  I should have the ability to open a new
> foreground
> or background tab, open the link in a new window or open the link in the
> active
> window.
> 
> Reproducible: Always
> 
> Steps to Reproduce:
> 1. Get a piece of mail with links in it
> 2. Right-click link for options.  Scant.
> 3. Do any special clicks.  (Ctrl-Shift-Click).
> 
> Actual Results:  
> No options.  Always performs default action of opening in the default web
> browser, over the active page.
> 
> Expected Results:  
> Any option allowed in Firebird.  I should see the options if I right-click. 
> If
> I Ctrl-Shift-Click a link, that link should open in a new tab in Firebird,
> with
> that tab being the active tab.

They Don't before I used outlook, I was using thunderbird and their are different completly, apart from the theme that I had on Thunderbird was also on firefox.